First Results From the Snd@lhc Experiment

Abstract

SND@LHC started taking data at the beginning of Run 3 of the LHC. The experiment is designed to perform measurements with neutrinos produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC in an energy range between 100 GeV and 1 TeV. It covers a previously unexplored pseudo-rapidity range of 7.2 < η < 8.4. The detector is located 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point in the TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 800 kg target mass of tungsten plates, interleaved with emulsion and electronic trackers, followed downstream by a calorimeter and a muon system. The configuration allows efficiently distinguishing between all three neutrino flavours, opening a unique opportunity to probe physics of heavy flavour production at the LHC in the region that is not accessible to ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. This region is of particular interest also for future circular colliders and for predictions of very high-energy atmospheric neutrinos. The detector concept is also well suited to searching for Feebly Interacting Particles via signatures of scattering in the detector target. The experiment has published several results. This work focuses on the experience gained from the first measurements and how this is being used to achieve the physics goals of SND@LHC. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).